Innumerable people, worldwide, suffer from skin disorders. These skin disorders can include burns, cuts, sores, dry skin, thinning skin, wrinkling, eczema, inflammations, itchy skin, infections, psoriasis, skin rashes, sunburn, parasites and many more. The reasons for these skin problems may be faulty diet, hormone imbalances, blood toxicity, ineffective cleansing, illness, disease, injury, exposure to an irritants or caustic substances, allergies, aging, excess or improper use of cosmetics or any other reason, causing an afflicted individual or subject discomfort or suffering. To relieve this suffering, the afflicted individual or subject needs to pursue: (1) a quick and accurate diagnosis; (2) identification and administration of an effective treatment; (3) monitoring the progression of the condition and the effectiveness of the treatment; (4) identify and implement of prevention, avoidance and/or mitigation strategies; and (5) long term surveillance.
In a traditional outpatient consultation and treatment process, the subject observes or is in some way made aware of a skin condition or disorder which causes him/her to consult with a physician. The physician asks a series of questions and does a preliminary examination. On conformation of a skin condition or disorder, the physician refers the subject to a specialist, typically a dermatologist, wherein a second appointment is made and the subject proceeds to consult with the dermatologist. The dermatologist reviews the referring physician's notes and asks a series of additional questions, many of which are the same as those asked by the referring physician. The dermatologist then performs an examination and may surgically or in some other way remove a sample of tissue for closer examination under a microscope or by a laboratory. It is also likely that, if laboratory testing is prescribed, a select set of blood tests will also be ordered. This will require the subject to schedule a third appointment to address the lab work. Several days or weeks after the visit to the lab, the subject is given a follow-up appointment with the dermatologist who: reviews his/her notes from the previous visit; reviews the lab reports; asks a few more questions; and reexamines the affected area. If the medical history, symptoms and lab results point to a skin condition or disorder that the dermatologist is familiar with, the dermatologist will make a diagnosis and prescribe a treatment. On the other hand, if the dermatologist does not recognize the symptoms, the dermatologist will order additional laboratory tests and may consult with another specialist. This process will continue until a diagnosis can be made or until no specific diagnosis can be made (based on the resources available to the dermatologist) and the condition/disorder is labeled as a non-specific disorder and a treatment may be prescribed to address one or more of the overt symptoms.
When a condition is unchanged or worsens, due to a misdiagnosis or failure-to-diagnose situation, the appointment, questioning, examination and lab work sequence is resumed until the next diagnosis and treatment. This process is inherently flawed due to its highly qualitative nature, requiring human judgment, experience, training/education, knowledge, curiosity, intuition, skill, interest, energy, memory, motivation, intelligence and many other variable and often limited human characteristics. Consequentially, serious problems such as misdiagnosis, delayed-diagnosis, failure-to-diagnose and failure-to-detect treatment complications occur more frequently than what is desired or appropriate. This process is also inefficient and expensive, requiring: access to qualified physicians; a protracted period of time to acquire a diagnosis; a significant amount of high-cost physician labor hours; and unnecessary laboratory tests.
In recent time, technology and medical science has shown significant developments in this field of detecting, diagnosing, and treating derma disorders. Derma disorders can display unique visible spectrum, fluorescent, and radiometric characteristics, thus attempts have been made wherein by digitally capturing the quantitative value of theses characteristics of a derma disorder, analysis may be performed. Derma disorder analysis and condition diagnosis may be done by local or remotely situated dermatologists by looking at these captured quantitative values. Attempts could be seen wherein computerized systems have been used to address some of the derma disorders.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,571,003 discloses an apparatus and method that can be implemented by a human operator and a computing device to analyze and display human skin images. The system acquires a digital image from a camera or scanner. Subsequently, the system determines which area(s) of the image to analyze using landmarks such as the corner of the eye. The determined areas are then analyzed to locate skin defects such as red spots, and the defects are visually identified on a display. A severity is calculated for the defects and the severity is compared to an average skin severity associated with a population of people. In addition, a simulation is generated and displayed showing an improvement to the defect areas. The above approach is limited to solve the visual skin problems of a subject's face and enables a beauty counselor in selecting a suitable cosmetic product in regard to the subject's facial problem.
United States Patent Publication Number 20060095297 discloses a kiosk for topical skin assessment surveys and skin care selection. The topical skin assessment survey is performed by a self-guided interactive program using a plurality of UVA lamps which illuminate trouble spots on the skin that cannot be seen in a natural light environment. The kiosk also provides price comparison of available cosmetic and skin-care products, and the option to purchase products. The above approach simply enables a subject to select a suitable cosmetic product present in kiosk database, and the equipment used for analysis dose not includes advance technologies and methodologies.
Such attempts have addressed only a miniscule portion of the derma problems at large. Accordingly, what is needed is a comprehensive, automated derma diagnostic system for assessing the condition of a subject's skin or derma, in order to establish a diagnosis, prescribe a treatment and monitor a condition's progression and the effectiveness of the treatment.